Time to unload some more recent and semi-recent news items.
1. Jeff Bridges says he has been approached about appearing in Tron 2. Woo-hoo! — Collider.com
2. Nikki Finke reports that Battlestar Galactica, which was shooting its fourth and final season until the writers’ strike got in the way, may be one of several series that ends up being cancelled altogether, now that a “brawl” is beginning to brew between the studio and the actors whose careers have been put on indefinite hold without pay. — Deadline Hollywood Daily
3. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now (1979), is out on DVD now, and the reviews are middling. Apparently the master was taken from a 16-year-old videotape, and thus the DVD looks no better than the VHS version. — Hollywood Elsewhere, DVDizzy.com
4. Films about adult brother-sister relationships are a rare breed, and somehow Laura Linney has managed to co-star in two of the better ones: You Can Count on Me (2000), which prompted me to write this article on cinematic siblings for the Vancouver Sun, and The Savages, which I saw at the local film festival a month or two ago; it begins its regular theatrical release November 28. So I was tickled to read that Mark Ruffalo and Philip Seymour Hoffman, her “brothers” in those two films, were both on hand to pay tribute to Linney at the AFI Fest last week. — FilmStew.com
5. McG, of all people, is still attached to direct Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins for release sometime in summer 2009. A videogame is already being developed to coincide with that release. — JoBlo.com, Moviehole, Hollywood Reporter
6. Alexandre Desplat is easily one of my favorite film composers these days — in the past 12 months alone, he’s written some great music for The Painted Veil, Lust Caution and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium — so I’m looking forward to the music he’s whipped up for The Golden Compass. A track listing for the soundtrack album is now online. — Play.com
7. The Confucius Foundation is teaming up with two Chinese media firms to make a series of 13-minute cartoons on the life and teachings of the legendary philosopher Confucius, who is apparently “undergoing a major revival in China these days.” The first of a projected 100 episodes is set to air in 2009. — Variety
8. The Squid and the Whale‘s Jesse Eisenberg and National Treasure‘s Justin Bartha will play “drug-dealing Hasidic Jews” in a “comic drama” called Holy Rollers. “The film, one of the first to emerge from the burgeoning ‘Jewsploitation’ genre, is ripped from true-crime headlines and follows an impressionable youth (Eisenberg) from an Orthodox Brooklyn community. He’s lured into becoming an Ecstasy dealer by a friend (Bartha) with ties to an Israeli drug cartel.” — Hollywood Reporter
9. Jean-Marc Vallée, writer-director-star of the Québécois hit C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), is now directing Emily Blunt in The Young Victoria, a movie about the early days of the English queen who came to embody 19th-century Britain. Vallée has brought a number of key production crew members from Montreal, and he says it feels like “a French-Canadian invasion of Britain.” — Globe and Mail
10. The crackdown on movie piracy has begun: a man in Montreal has been arrested under the new Canadian law banning camcording in movie theatres. — Canadian Press
11. Violence in Baghdad has dropped as much as 77% since the “surge” began in February, so the locals are staging their first film festival in two years in mid-December. Most cinemas remain closed, but it is hoped that the festival will get people going to the movies again. — Variety
12. Sylvester Stallone explains again how John Rambo has lost faith in his country, God, and humanity in general when Rambo IV begins: “He realizes his entire existence has been for naught . . . Peace is an accident, war is natural. Old men start it, young men fight it, everybody in the middle dies, and nobody tells the truth. He says, ‘You think God’s going to make it all go away? What has he done and changed in the world? He has done nothing. We are an aggressive animal and will never be at peace.’ That’s how he feels.” The Christian missionaries who reach out to him for help “somehow touch the last remaining nerve in Rambo’s body”. — USA Today
13. New Line Cinema has set February 13, 2009 as the release date for its remake of Friday the 13th (1980). That happens to be my 4th wedding anniversary, and the 6th anniversary of the second date I went on with my wife-to-be. I have only seen the original Friday the 13th once, and it was with her. — ComingSoon.net
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